European research – No man is an island
25.03.13
EFPIA's Director General, Richard Bergström, puts forward his views on European Research.
Human beings do not thrive when isolated from others. Effective change and important discoveries are not made by a single man, it is the sum of the different parts brought to the research process from different minds that create the innovation. Knowing this, why do we continue to think that countries on their own will be stronger than together with others? Why does research still only happen in a single place rather than in cooperation throughout the EU? Imagine what we could get out of such partnerships; imagine the benefits if, at a time of cuts in science, we could find a mechanism of cooperation across EU boarders. Some will say this is a distant concept which will never happen. Yet it is currently happening in the shape of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI).
Research in the EU is fragmented. A recent report on the issue put forward that “coinventorship in Europe continues to be largely shaped by national borders, in contrast to the community structure of the highly dispersed ‘coast-to-coast’ US coinventor network”. Efforts by the EU to develop such a network date back to the first framework programmes but really saw progress with the launch of the European Research Area (ERA) in 1998. The study goes further by stating that since 2003, cross-border links across European Union borders grew no faster than similar links among non-EU OECD countries. The question is here what can be done. The results of the study are certainly worrying given the resources that have been pumped into making cross-border scientific collaboration a reality.
I am of the opinion that it is not just by throwing money at something that it will grow. There is a need for incentives, but also and mainly a framework that means that collaboration is a fact and no longer an option. So what then?
This is where Public Partnerships become so relevant, and the IMI is a fantastic example of this. The initiative is starting to bear fruit and with it a new path for innovation in the EU. As it is a public private partnership, its programmes and projects build networks of industrial and academic experts throughout the EU that will, in the long run, boost innovation in healthcare and act as a neutral third party by creating a collaborative ecosystem for pharmaceutical research and development (R&D). We also have some great statistics to back these claims up:
- To date, IMI projects have produced 320 publications – over one-third of which have been published in the last six months – appearing in more than 150 journals including Nature, JAMA and, more recently, Science.
- Around three-quarters (73.1%) of IMI researchers collaborated (co-authored) with at least one other IMI researcher during the period of analysis (Section 7.5).
- The average citation impact of IMI research is well above world and European averages and over twice the world average for specific research fields. Furthermore, over one-tenth of papers from IMI[3] projects are ‛highly-cited’, that is, they belong to the world’s top ten percent of papers in that journal category and year of publication, when ranked by number of citations received.
- These researchers are also highly collaborative. About two-fifths of all publications by IMI researchers were cross-sector, for example, between academic institutions and small medium enterprises (SMEs). About one-quarter of all publications were cross-project; this has increased slightly from the first analysis of Call 1 researchers.
There is still a lot of work to do before European nations stop being research “islands” and understand the strength of collaborative research. However, in the IMI we have a perfect example of how this can be done and I hope that this example will be followed in the years to come as I believe it is the future of research and innovation in the EU
